Free A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Page B

dressing room, I lingered outside, looking distractedly at some sweaters. She was in there for a long time, and at one point she said, quietly, "I see your feet," so I had to move off. When she came out, she was subdued again. She handed the dresses to the saleslady with a smile and moved toward the door. I pretended to rummage through some belts, but when she went out into the street, I followed her.

    We looked in the next shop window, a shoe store, and the next, the live-and-ten. She stared for a long time at the cold-mist humidifiers.

    I said, "You heard from Caroline?"

    "No."

    "Who do you think's going to make the first move?"

    She turned and looked at me, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight. "Has Daddy ever made a first move? I mean in a reconciliatory way?"

    "Well, no. But that's with us. This is with Caroline."

    "When water runs uphill is when he'll make a first move."

    "You'd think she'd be more careful."

    Rose started walking again. "She doesn't have to be careful. She's got an income. Being his daughter is all pretty abstract for her, and I'm sure she wants to keep it that way. Mark my words. She and Frank will get married and produce a son and there'll be a lot of coming together around that. She always does what she has to do."

    "You sound annoyed with her, too. She was coming up the steps.

    It was Daddy who slammed the door."

    "But there didn't have to be any production at all, no breach, no reconciliation, no drama. She just can't stand to be one of us, that's the key. Haven't you ever noticed? When we go along, she balks.

    When we resist, she's sweet as pie."

    "Maybe."

    "Shit! I remember when she was all of about live years oldbefore Mommy died, at any rate. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, and Mommy was cooking dinner and Caroline was coloring, and she looked at each of us and said right out, 'When I grow up, I'm not going to be a farmwife." So Mommy laughed and asked her what she was going to be, and she said, 'A farmer."

    I laughed. We walked on, agreeing wordlessly to avoid the subject of Caroline. My stomach growled. I said, "Rosie, let's eat at Golden Corral and see if we can get a look at what the prostitutes wear to work."

    "I think I'd rather go home. There's food there."

    -'Are you tired?"

    'Yeah."

    I didn't argue. I never have with Rose. When we got in the car, she said, "You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in?

    That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow.

    And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow, but I forgot.

    I'm not really to the point where I can take off my clothes in a dressing room yet." She sighed. I pulled out of the parking lot.

    A few minutes later, she said, "What's the hardest thing for you?"

    "Well, I don't know. Probably being comfortable with people outside the family."

    'What do you mean?"

    'Oh, you know. I either act too shy, or else I want the person to be my friend so much that I act like an idiot. I never believe that Marlene Stanley or anyone else actually likes me, even though I suppose I know they do."

    "God! This is just like how you used to talk in junior high."

    I stiffened a little. "What practice have I had since then? Anyway, in junior high, you used to say, 'Wouldn't you like to be friends with so-and-so? Let's bring some cookies and offer one to so-andso, then maybe she'll be our friend."

    Rose laughed a full-throated, merry laugh. "Usually it worked, too."

    We drove in silence for a few minutes.

    Finally, she said, "You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab.

    What's worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that